“You have a telescope! Use it much? What can you see? Can we take it outside and look at the moon?” Our visitor is asking about the telescope in the corner or our living room and his enthusiasm is infectious.
It revives my own, which has been dampened by a combination of aging eyes and increasing light pollution. Don’t get me wrong. I still enjoy seeing some of the more popular and, by now, familiar sights in the universe. Close up views of lunar craters, the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter are as spectacular as ever, but the thrill of the hunt for fainter objects – wispy filaments of interstellar gas that look like a pelican, a dumbbell, or the outline of North America – fades with the growing effort of finding them.
And it doesn’...
